Posted on 02/05/2014 12:13:24 PM PST by mojito
...[Ma]ny observers across the political spectrum argue that there’s no coherent American Middle East policy at all....[C]olumnist Charles Krauthammer argues that Obama is simply presiding over a decline in American influence, while Democratic[s]...like Sen. Robert Menendez apparently can’t make heads or tails of the White House’s Iran policy. If sanctions got the Iranians to the negotiating table...then why is the White House fighting against a further round of sanctions that would give Washington more leverage?
Because it’s part of the Administration’s grand strategy. As Obama explained to David Remnick in a recent New Yorker interview, the goal is to create a “geopolitical equilibrium” between Sunni “Gulf states and Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.”
And so it turns out that the Kennan of Obama’s Middle East policy is Stephen Walt, the Harvard professor, who outlined the same idea Obama described to Remnick in a Nov. 21 post on FP.com in which he argued for a “realist, balance-of-power policy.” According to Walt, the specific question facing U.S. policymakers is how to achieve such a policy, when the United States has “‘special relationships’ with certain regional powers”—like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and, of course, Israel.
It is the focus on the impediment posed by these “special relationships” to realist balance-of-power policymaking that distinguishes Walt from virtually every other American in the realist school. Sure, former policymakers like Jim Baker have lamented the influence of Jewish Americans on American policymaking—but compared to Walt, Baker was a squish. It was Walt whose 2006 London Review of Books article “The Israel Lobby,” co-authored with University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, later expanded into a controversial book with the same title, first targeted the problem directly: The pro-Israel community needs to be cut down to size.
(Excerpt) Read more at tabletmag.com ...
A must read.
we’ve always ascribed O’s anti-American, anti-Christian and anti0-Jewish policies to his own upbringing
but it is clear that he also surrounds himself with the worst kind of haters as assistants and advisers...
so he has almost no hope of ever improving for the better
seems more like Walt Disney inspired it
Assuming Obama follows at least one part of the Constitution, he will improve immeasurably on January 20, 2017. I'm not optimistic enough to bet on any other improvements, ever.
Let’s have a pro-american policy that preserves our blood and treasure by staying our of thousand year wars where losing is the only option.
the “pro-Israel” lobby is ten times smaller than the “pro-Saudi” lobby, and it was the Saudi lobby that made millions in donations to Harvard before the professor’s book, “The Israeli Lobby” came out - a book that was in fact panned by the critics
so far there’s no reason to believe he will follow any one particular part of the constitution, given how he violates or seeks to undermine all its various provisions anytime he can
therefore, it remains to be seen if January 17, 2017 will bring any change, or not
It was too late for that vain hope when Hagar called the angel "god" and the adversary never corrected her. Instead, he told her what he was going to do for her. It is soluble only by defeating Islam to its core, de-legitimizing its divine agency entirely by ridicule combined with overwhelming power.
Thanks for posting this. While more of a candle then a klieg light, it offers some illumination of a subject that heretofore has been totally opaque. I’d love to see Caroline Glick’s take on the premise.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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Quick searching indicates that Mearsheimer (Walt’s coauthor) was teaching at University of Chicago when Obama was a lecturer there. Walt taught there as well but I’m not sure when. It seems likely that O and Walt have met.
Sounds like the Chicago Mob is branching out into foreign policy...
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